The real scandal

The real scandal is that the IRS is wonderfully illustrative of the state of government in the 21st Century.

The vast majority of decisions made by “the government” (well over 99%) are made without any input from the President, the President’s immediate staff and advisors, anyone appointed by the President, anyone in Congress or that ultimate reports to Congress, or anyone else remotely impacted by any sort of election.

Note that the Commissioner of the IRS at the time was acting, meaning that it was probably permanent bureaucrats all the way down. The system functions with or without members of the temporary (i.e. appointed) government.

The fact is that regardless of who had won any election, the IRS would probably done this stuff anyway. President Ron Paul or whoever can’t change that.

It’s clearly sub-optimal to have these sorts of policy decisions (as well as the first line interpretation decisions and enforcement decisions (so much for separation of powers)) made by the same unknown, unaccountable and unremovable entity. Such is the state of the government under which we live.

The only good thing one can say about this state of affairs is that of all the ways for democracies to end, this is a pretty good one.

Agreed. I really can’t figure out what anyone is surprised about here.

Conservatives suggesting that Obama put the IRS up to it are almost as bad. The only real way to get the IRS not to target conservative groups would be if Obama had asked them to do it. We bureaucrats are very protective of our faux-independence.

A decent theory, and likely there are some savvy and cynical actors out there who are fully cognizant of the reality of USG but just looking to make as much hay as possible by exploiting the scandal while they can still rely media amplification until this news-cycle is over.

But my impression is that most people complaining loudly still believe in and cling to comfortable USG fairy tales as being “basically good and fair and honest” and are genuinely surprised and outraged at what is, to them, a revelation.

In support of my claim, I would like to present exhibit A – what is being proposed by those who are, perhaps, “in the know”. Which is nothing but “investigation and disciplinary action”. That is, not fundamental reform that gets to the very heart of the problem. As of yet, I’m not aware of any congressmen who has proposed a bill to remove auditing discretion from the Treasury Department, let alone other agencies.

For Pete’s sake – this is tax auditing, fully able to be automated on the basis of criteria written in law. Computers at the IRS have been establishing statistical profiles of indicators of likely tax evasion behavior (“red flags”) for 40 years. Per Carlyle, maybe you can’t run the whole government “by steam”, but audit selection is your easiest candidate by far for automation.

And there are other techniques. Arbitrators and Mediators and Patent Officers are often asked to review motions and applications with personally identifying information minimized or sanitized out to reduce the possibility of bias or favoritism. And they are occasionally randomly tested themselves to ensure that they are consistent and give the same answers, or make the same requests for more information, in two similarly situation scenarios.

There’s no reason Congress can’t mandate similar discretionary bias-elimination systems in place at IRS, or DHS, or HHS. But they don’t. If someone on the right truly understands government, they would, at the very least, be able to recognize their enemies and seek at first opportunity to disarm them. That’s not happening. Ergo – I presume they are asleep to real knowledge.

There’s a real scandal. It’s that these IRS goons got caught. How gauche! What rubes! Back of the bus with you!
It seems they got caught by being betrayed. Who admits to wrongdoing? Even I don’t admit to wrongdoing. They could have stymied the Tea Party groups indefinitely by stonewalling. I’ve seen lots of that. Didn’t.

If anyone has a better story of how it came about, please let me know. (Google’s results are even more useless than I expected, though with bonus amusement.) For now, it seems to me like office politics spilling into the newspapers.

At first, I thought it was some inversion here. Not exactly like, but more like, average employee pisses off corrupt boss.

“Lois G. Lerner, the IRS official who oversees tax-exempt groups, said the “absolutely inappropriate” actions by “front-line people” were not driven by partisan motives.
[…]
During that period, about 75 groups were selected for extra inquiry — including burdensome questionnaires and, in some cases, improper requests for the names of their donors — simply because of the words in their names, she said in a conference call with reporters. ”

There be no story and no scandal if she hadn’t admitted anything. However, it may be the gauche rube I’m talking about is Lois herself.

“It was not clear whether the IRS had anticipated the firestorm that it would ignite with its disclosure. Indeed, it appeared to have happened by chance when Lerner, appearing Friday at a conference held by the American Bar Association, responded to a question about the allegations by conservative groups.”

While I can and have pulled off this kind of ‘accidental disclosure’ plot as a double-subversion, I don’t think it’s safe for me to assume it happens commonly. Plus, it would have to be a very indirect plot, as it doesn’t target any particular front-liner specifically. It would have to be to discredit someone whose prestige is a function of IRS front-liners’.

–

You know, this journalistic obsession with facts is obscuring all the relevant facts.

1. Someone at the office pisses off Lois, so when a reporter asks a question where the answer would piss them off back, she impulsively gives the answer.

2. Lois is incompetent.

3. Lois is hyper-competent and is targeting someone – whose name will never show up in the news. (Or is being coached – I’m sure she’d be a wonderful cat’s paw.) Who in the office is going to be held socially responsible for ordering/allowing front liners to discriminate like this? Or, more precisely, for allowing them to do it such that they can be caught.

Just in case anyone was worried that investigative journalism might not be entirely fake.

4. Lois is friends with someone in one of the targeted groups, who got mad and groused to Lois.

–

Incidentally, this is one of the Cathedral’s glaring weaknesses. Because it is up to so much funny business, any insider can torpedo their agency at will. It may be that job immortality is the only thing holding this back – if your boss pisses you off, you can just ignore them, rather than hassling yourself with the press.

“Memories: I always thought the number of Bill Clinton enemies audited by his Internal Revenue Service was a bit high to be coincidental…

“We now know, of course, that you don’t need direct White House involvement to politicize the IRS, at least for Democrats.** The underlings know what to do! The idea that they are apolitical professionals was always a myth. It’s even more of a myth now, in the era of Daily Kos and Greg Sargent…

“P.P.S.: Two days before the I.R.S. apologized for auditing Tea Party Groups, the Social Security Administration released an obviously politicized estimate of the effect of passing immigration reform (it conveniently looked only 10 years out, covering the years most immigrants would be contributing to the system but not the years they’d be collecting benefits). So the I.R.S. has been politicized, and the actuaries at Social Security have been politicized. But only crazy right wing nutters would dare to suggest that the Bureau of Labor Statistics might have been politicized in October, 2012 when it released the most politically consequential monthly jobs numbers in memory. Got it.

“**–What percentage of IRS employees are Democrats? My guess is over 70%. It’s like the theater: Conservatives just tend to not go into that line of work. That’s why it is actually more troubling if the politicization is due to self-starting mid-level Obamaphilic officials. The argument would be this: Big government will always mean giving bureaucrats some control, and these bureaucrats will always tend to be Democrats. If they aren’t restrained by the apolitical civil service ethic, then they will always tend to harrass conservatives and Republicans. It takes a willful bad actor like Nixon to get them to act differently and harrass Democrats instead.”

There’s no conspiracy like that going on here. Sometimes the market determines when the commercial press just can’t pass on a story.

You can tell when this is true when there’s a split between the commercial press and the popular progressive commentators, desperately trying to spin the story into a non-story for the benefit of the administration.

It’s one of those few occasions when progressives curse “the press” (as if they aren’t “the press”) just like conservatives. But instead of doing it for “lying” they call it “over-exaggerating” or “hyping” or “lack of discipline”. It’s also when members of the commercial press feel like they have to apologize (in person or on twitter) for their “I’m sorry, I know it’s wrong, but my hands are tied” need to occasionally entertain the proles and pay the bills even if it mildly stabs their own side in the back.

Summarizing and mocking that spin is the point of that Megan McArdle story that Foseti linked.

People hate red light cameras too (even the honestly timed ones), even though the fines are mild, doesn’t add points, and they send you a sequence of pictures showing you breaking the law. They generate lots of news too.

People don’t like the feeling of being under the eye of inescapable and perfectly just authority. That’s why they don’t like Old God and it doesn’t take much to convince people to abandon Him. They prefer progressive or buddy Jesus instead.

One of the goals of Progressivism is to eliminate politics and politicians from governance and to turn all decisions over to tenured bureaucrats. So, while the politically appointed heads of agencies have nominal responsibility, actual decisions can and are made at lower levels. And since the Gramscian march through the institutions is nearly complete, the largely, if not entirely, leftist apparatchiks will do stuff like this without being told. Their equally leftist bosses will approve and reward such behavior when it remains undiscovered and attempt some sort of cover up (and sacrifice some underling) when it is revealed. The game is finally over, and the sons of Stalin will reveal themselves when these scandals are not longer scandals.

“The only good thing one can say about this state of affairs is that of all the ways for democracies to end, this is a pretty good one.”

Other than the ritual of elections, empty of power but powerful ritual how can you contend Administrative Government since the New Deal is “democracy”? Democracy in America ran from 1830-1933.

I’m quite the fan of democracy now, I’d war for it. In America. Democracy is not for every demos. But it’s time has come for this demos. I think many of them agree.

Democracy in America could have destroyed the country, but it did not. We actually owe the Progs a debt of gratitude for snaking it away 80 years ago. We the People can only be blamed for being trusting and asleep.*

For instance did 19th century America build our great cities and vast wealth…or destroy everything it touched? A destruction that seeks not only the ruin of all under it’s smothering love but the ruin of their souls as well…flooding us with drugs and pornography.

At a higher level, meaningful democracy cannot exist (outside of a very small political entity).

“The people” don’t know what they want. And it’s very easy for someone to tell them want they want. “Democracy” immediately degenerates into rule by the person who manufactures consent, to use Maine’s phrase.

Btw, Maine wrote in the period in which VXXC thinks we had democracy. A quick review of Maine’s work (Popular Government) will demonstrate that we had no such thing.

Commenter above mentioned it makes good copy because people hate the IRS this is true, and this behavior, which reactionaries envision it being par for the norm, is a surprise to the vast unwashed masses. That is why this is important. If the dumdum conservatives do uncover the widespread left lean of the IRS it will uncover in discovery a bunch of things reactionaries discuss amongst themselves and try to explain to normies. The best thing that could happen is that the IRS thing doesnt link back to anyone high up, but in the course of covering the story (and hopefully absolving St. Obama + cronies), the press relays to the public the story of how thoroughly the civil service is progressive. This is a chance to educate the masses who may be open to the message.

@Foesti – again – “Democracy in America could have destroyed the country, but it did not….For instance did 19th century America build our great cities and vast wealth…or destroy everything it touched? A destruction that seeks not only the ruin of all under it’s smothering love but the ruin of their souls as well”

We didn’t have pure democracy, we had democracy grafted onto the Republic of 1789 – which strengthened it. In most countries this would have destroyed the state…BUT…we grew immensely strong.
The people were another check on the State. Imagine if they had no voice and the post Civil War Union from 1865 to 1933 could have ignored them? What would you get?

Probably what we have now. Perhaps with a less pornographic popular culture. Our finances would be the same. Remember the people want sound money more than bankers. Fiat money is a bankers dream. It’s business and the people who need stable money.

The problems that occur with Progressive tyranny would likely happen now under a Reactionary oligarchy sooner than later. Kleptocracy for instance. We’re there now. What Julius Pierpont or indeed what Plutocrat now would you trust with formal powers of reactionary government? Who are these noblemen you would trust with such powers? If they are products of our society then…they have low morals and no idea how to govern for any other than themselves. What great House would you restore? Hilton? Kardashian? Even the Winsdors?

I don’t view a restoration of democracy and the Constitution only as goals – although that’s a standard many would get behind. They are methods – especially the demos. The demos are a dangerous but powerful tool. As they are awakening perhaps Reaction should adjust to that fact. And that our actual Patricians have NOTHING to offer the plebes but betrayal, their core product service offering.

You can’t have Patricians that hate the nation ruling it. We have that now. It’s well past snobbery, it’s insane malice.

By the way if Patrician rule is to rise..then it will have to rise from the ranks. Our elites certainly can’t be trusted to produce men of character, virtue and courage. We would need some new Patricians.

If you have position it was not given to you to be an snob, above what is fraying apart below you..be a Tribune at least. We have of course no Patricians.

What I mean is second democracy, the initial franchise is men of duty, the extended franchise is determined by local boards – your neighbors decide who gets the franchise, it’s in their interest to extend it only to the responsible.

We have elections, not democracy. As you know.

Of course there’s some rather big steps to take before either happens. The first step is to realize what Second Democracy means. [Uncle Sams Misguided Children by comparison understood immediately. You may find them on Facebook.]
A clue is “duty”.

Second Democracy is a vehicle to restore both the Constitution we are sworn to defend – I assume you took the oath – and to restore primarily the Constitution with democracy for the responsible as both a check and a safeguard against the People simply being ruined by a new bunch of criminals. If you fear the people you should. As should their government. The people are something to be feared if they are awake. I make the point again – they are.

It was said of the Depression that it gave radicalism it’s chance. Radicalism has run it’s ruinous course. Here is the chance for Restoration. *But* you see the demos in America won’t get behind some idea of a King…who by the way? Nor are they going to get behind some nearly incomprehensible Joint Stock corporate scheme who’s Standard promises to put them in their place, but with more dignity. That dignity being work or don’t eat, and so on.

We already have a Restoration ready made of course, some of us took an oath to it. Again American democracy and the Constitution aren’t just ends, they are means. They are method.

And both – even yes American democracy – would be enormously Reactionary in character. And you’d have people ready to get behind such a Restoration. In fact – they are being audited and oppressed even for wishing to talk about the Constitution. I think in marketing terms…it’s a winner.

You must consider the Oath, and that many believed the words they swore. The most sacrificing and bravest of which come from the despised demos. They are something to consider.

General Robert E. Lee was famous for giving his officers wide discretionary authority. He was confident that he could rely on them to “do the right thing”. Would it be fair to say that his officers were “out of control” and that he had no way to rein them back in?

I see contradictory statements about democracy and the civil service. Moldbug says both that America’s problem is democracy and that America isn’t democratic. I read here both that elected officials have no control over the civil service and that the civil service jealously guard their faux-independence. Which is it? Is it real, or is it faux? Is the civil service (consistently dominated by the Cathedral) outside of the control of Congress (less consistent, but still dominated by the Cathedral)? Or is it more like General Lee, intermittently out of contact with his officers, creating and delegating authority to an institution that has a more immediate and better entrenched grip on power?

Bryan Caplan addressed this point in _The Myth of the Rational Voter_. He views subordinates (i.e. the permanent bureaucracy) as providing Congress with plausible deniability and a stable of convenient cutouts for when things go wrong.

My position is that Congress (i.e. the senior officers of the Cathedral) *could* rein in the junior officers of the Cathedral if they wanted to. But why on Earth would they want to?

It is only the Outer Party that might want to, and even there, it’s only rogue elements within the Outer Party. It is these “rogue” elements of the Outer Party that are unable to control Sir Humphrey, because they have never had enough power, for long enough, with enough insight into the problem.

As usual, Peter A. Taylor (people, stop what you’re doing and read all his essays!) makes an excellent and insightful comment that deserves a much more thorough reply than I can or should provide here. But a few quick notes.

1. Some delegation of major subjective judgment functions to subordinates cannot be avoided in any sizable organization. It’s an issue of time management, prioritization, and competence / expertise to handle particular subject matters. The big question is how does one construct a controlled and reliable system of delegation. How are delegees chosen, what are the obvious various threats and pitfalls to granting them authority, and what mechanisms does the leadership put in place to police the system.
2. The threat analysis piece is, in my view, the most important part, it determines the context of the problem, and that is largely a matter of being wise and clever about incentives and the nature of the human material you’ve got to work with. It is, fundamentally, a question of divided loyalties.
3. Subordinates are supposed to be agents of the organization’s interests (which are hopefully clear), and they owe a duty of undivided loyalty to their “client” to give their best reasonable efforts to maximize those interests within the constraints of law and organizational policy. If your subordinate is responsible for, say, hiring, and instead of choosing the most qualified candidate of best character decides to help his slacker nephew out, he’s betrayed the organization’s interests for his own / that of his relatives.
4. The problem with the current structure of American government is that our delegation control system is completely broken and dysfunctional from the point of view of even your average non-Democrat if only he could wear the Ring of Gyges and watch what actually goes on, and if he thinks the voters, through elected politicians and their appointees, should be “in charge”. He would conclude “I’m not sure, really, who’s actually in charge of whom. Preserving that ambiguity seems to be the point in some weird way. Few people in the system actually behave like the text on these documents says they should.”
5. The military is vastly different from the civil service (though increasingly less so, alas), and I would argue that it’s just sui generis and shouldn’t be thrown in to these sorts of analyses. For one – military officers have unique missions and incentives. Second – the military has a longer history of dealing successfully with exactly these sorts of issues. And finally – the military has vastly more power to police its (non unionized – by law) personnel than the bureaucracy (unionized, by law). You can kick a junior guy out on the street in three weeks for trivial misconduct. The gap between the ease and severity of military punishments and contemporary bureaucratic disciplinary procedures is so large it’s just incomparable. And really, that’s the problem.
6. How it got this way is a long, sad, and corrupt history. There’s the Pendleton Act. There the Lloyd Act The progressives has early success in eroding (now effectively neutralized) nondelegation doctrine. Then after the New Deal and WWII, there’s the APA. There’s Kennedy’s Executive Order 10988 and The Civil Service Act. There’s Chevron. The sum total of all these, plus many more, plus all the case law and regulations, is that Congress is much less able, both by law and as a practical matter, to put the fear of God into bureaucrats than they need to be.
7. But mainly, there’s a problem, to paraphrase David Axelrod (who ought to know), of the government being almost unmanageably vast and diverse in its functions. What can’t be managed isn’t managed. Who aren’t managed, manage themselves when they think they can. Nobody wants to take on the impossible task of actually trying to manage it. Nobody wants to be accountable and accept the responsibility of things going wrong that they can’t blame on somebody else (Caplan’s point) and certainly not congressmen who spend all their time focused on electioneering. They certainly don’t spend any time reading legislation. Even the staff-created “conceptual summaries” of modern legislation are so daunting (dozens of pages!) that no congressman reads them. Their party machines boil it down to one moral-marketing digestible point, “It’s about helping poor people get health care” and advise them how they should vote.
8. There are ways to deal with this problem (not fix it, but make some real improvement), even within our system. Those ways do pop up, actually, here and there, mainly in the military or in the most commercially-influenced or market relevant parts of the government. You could go through the whole US Code and CFR and take a machete to as many human discretion functions as possible.
9. Many of these functions could be done by computer these days. You may lose some judgment, maybe even cost in the short-term, but you’d gain in efficiency and objectivity. It feels somehow a bit weird to say that handing things over to microchips is what we need to do these days to achieve certain desirable human qualities like fairness and trustworthiness. But in the bureaucracy, being “good” is often just doing your job by following the rules – the absence of “bad”.
10. In the last century, Congress and the Courts have plowed and fertilized the richest soil possible to grow the power of the federal government. But they neglected the herbicide and, standing in horror at the magnitude of their task, dropped their hoes and fled the scene. And people are scandalized the farm is now overgrown with weeds.

Interesting point, but what if general Lee was only general for 3 years and his subordinates were all appointed for life?

That has to change the result!

Congress could theoretically reign in te bureaucracy only in a roundabout manner. We’re all executive branch employees, after all. Congress would have to pass laws (on subjects it doesn’t know well and only gets its information from the people it’s trying to regin in).

> “The people” don’t know what they want. And it’s very easy for someone to tell them want they want. “Democracy” immediately degenerates into rule by the person who manufactures consent, to use Maine’s phrase.

It’s not either/or. At times the people do know what they want. Some sort of franchise, probably not a universal one, can have a delimited place in certain parts of a good mixed constitution.

I realize people will try to universalize the franchise. The only solution is for man/society to actually grow up and change a little bit and learn a little from history, and develop relentless formal and informal propaganda, I mean education, about why that (inter alia) would be a bad idea.

Going way off topic. Hey RS, you don’t comment on my blog. Is that due to a problem that I should be fixing? Or is it that you just don’t feel like it?
If it’s some problem for you, it’s probably an issue for others as well.

Oh it’s simple, they butter the bread of half the people here.
They’re on the payroll you see.

I’ve concluded that modern reaction, while being the most original political thinking on the web has it’s genesis in government office workers who hate their idiot quota hire bosses and co-workers. A common malady amongst the government, most acute in DC. In no way does it invalidate the ideas. But you shouldn’t look to them for remedy. You see – it’s prole work.

Take comfort if you don’t accept the rule of degenerate predators – this is not the mindset of people who will die in the ditch defending our corrupt overlords. Or for that matter dig the ditch. That too is prole work.

[…] ok. there’s some kind of biological atrocity occurring in my sinuses right now, so I’m pretty much guaranteeing this won’t be pretty. wouldn’t bet on comprehensible either. the fact that I can now type easily again isn’t actually going to help. anyway, I really can’t agree with the positive view (hah) that Foseti takes here: […]

Certainly the Art of Writing is the most miraculous of all things man has devised. Odin's Runes were the first form of the work of a Hero; Books written words, are still miraculous Runes, the latest form! In Books lies the soul of the whole Past Time; the articulate audible voice of the Past, when the body and material substance of it has altogether vanished like a dream. Mighty fleets and armies, harbors and arsenals, vast cities, high-domed, many-engined,—they are precious, great: but what do they become? Agamemnon, the many Agamemnons, Pericleses, and their Greece; all is gone now to some ruined fragments, dumb mournful wrecks and blocks: but the Books of Greece! There Greece, to every thinker, still very literally lives: can be called up again into life. No magic Rune is stranger than a Book. All that Mankind has done, thought, gained or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of Books. They are the chosen possession of men.
—Thomas Carlyle

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"To have been always in the right and yet always on the losing side; always being ruined, always under persecution from a wild spirit of republican-demagogism,—and yet never to lose anything, not even position or public esteem, is pleasant enough. A huge, living, daily increasing grievance that does one no palpable harm, is the happiest possession that a man can have. There is a large body of such men in England, and, personally, they are the very salt of the nation. He who said that all Conservatives are stupid did not know them. Stupid Conservatives there may be,—and there certainly are very stupid Radicals. The well-educated, widely-read Conservative, who is well assured that all good things are gradually being brought to an end by the voice of the people, is generally the pleasantest man to be met."
- Anthony Trollope (in The Eustace Diamonds)

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.
- H. L. Mencken

The more I see of men, the better I like dogs.
- Madame Roland

vox populi, vox humbug
- W. T. Sherman

Once there was The People - Terror gave it birth;
Once there was The People and it made a Hell of Earth.
Earth arose and crushed it. Listen, O ye slain!
Once There was The People - it shall never be again!
- Rudyard Kipling (quoted from Easy as A.B.C.)

Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.
- John Adams

[T]he first Whig was the devil
- Samuel Johnson

The people that awakes, first shouts, then gets drunk, pillages, [and] murders, and later goes back to sleep.
- Don Colacho